Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi is a queer coming-of-age novel like no other, exploring trauma and its aftermath within an earthly body full of gods. The story centers on a young Nigerian girl named Ada, but is narrated largely by the Ogbanje—a swarm of Igbo spirits that come from the womb of the python deity Ala and inhabit Ada’s body at birth. Ogbanje, translated as “children come and go,” are understood to be a kind of trickster entity; they are born in human form and die in childhood only to be reborn to the parents as a kind of torment. Ada and her spirits, however, survive into adulthood and therefore deal with a great deal of very human violence: intimate brutality such as rape, abuse, mutilation, and self-harm, but also larger systems of brutality like colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Rather than pathologize Ada’s external behaviors or dissect the violence of this human world, the narration is much more interested in Ada’s path to survival and her integration of self—in being more-than-human and contained in a human body, and the bridges that must be created between spirits and flesh.
The narration moves between three speakers: the human known as “the Ada”—who narrates the smallest portion of the novel, the “beastself” Asughara, and the swarm of spirits within Ada—known to the reader as “We,” and the most frequent narrator. Asughara, as well as one other entity called Saint Vincent, come into being over the course of the novel as results of trauma, and are the only individual beings outside of the god-swarm. The novel is initially narrated by “We,” who lie mostly dormant in Ada at first but come forward to help her to cope, in what are often troubling rituals of self-harm and dissociation, with the violence she experiences even from a young age. As she grows into adolescence, the two distinct entities begin to emerge in her mind and Ada initially refers to them as Smoke and Shadow. When Ada enters an abusive relationship at her college in Virginia, one of these entities—now re-named Asughara—comes into a fully realized individual self and thrusts forward as a powerful, sensuous, and destructive mirror image of Ada. Asughara, “the beastself,” manifests as the hungry, protective force Ada needs to survive—but gods don’t understand the intricacies of humankind, don’t feel the need to control the animalistic hungers that arise when they are shoved into fleshly bodies. Ogbanjes also have an inherent yearning to return to their “brothersisters” in the womb of the mother-python Ala, so at times Asughara’s methods of “protection” seem cruel and ill-intentioned: she takes over the body to have unprotected sex with often abusive men, she encourages Ada to stop eating, and she demands blood sacrifice through self-harm to feed her brutal hungers. The counterbalance to Asughara is brought into being at the same moment as her—a gentler, masculine entity now known as Saint Vincent. Unlike Asughara, he is not god-spawn:
“He belonged nowhere, except maybe to the Ada….Perhaps in another world where the Ada was not split and segmented, she and Saint Vincent might have been one thing together….Perhaps he had been there all along and we just never noticed, we were so young. ”
Although Saint Vincent sloughs off Asughara’s side in the moment of their birth, he comes from within Ada’s own self rather than the god-swarm that shares her body. He cannot initially take control of the body the way Asughara is able to, but crafts himself a masculine body in Ada’s dream realm where he explores the sensations of having a self; he is eventually able to pilot the real body as well, but must alter it slightly to make it gender-neutral enough for him to ride. He never narrates a chapter in the novel, but the three selves can meet “in the marble of the Ada’s mind,” where they appear in their own dream-bodies and can interact with each other.
As the novel continues, Ada’s body is transformed for the multiplicity of her being. When Asughara first takes over the body, she cuts Ada’s long hair off close to the scalp—witnessed in horror by the women at the salon as a kind of mutilation—as a way to make the physical self look more like her own dream self. She starves Ada and makes her almost weightless, all long legs and sharp angles. She collects a sleeve of jagged scars from Ada’s sacrifices over the years. When Saint Vincent becomes capable of embodying the flesh, he binds the breasts and later he gets breast reduction surgery. Marking an Ogbanje child with a scar was believed in Igbo culture to be a way to ensure the spirit could be recognized for what it was upon reincarnation; these transformations of the body therefore begin the spirits’ process of becoming embodied and seen, despite the apparent harm it inflicts on Ada. “The whole is greater than the individual,” as Asughara understands her role in the body. With the breast reduction surgery comes a new understanding of the body as a shared space, liminal in its appearance and belonging to the full multiplicity of Ada’s interior identities.
As the novel comes to a close Ada is finally speaking from her point of view, but she does so with the cadence and otherworldliness of the “We” narrator. After Ada tries to banish Asughara from her mind and Asughara convinces Ada to attempt suicide, no spirit ends up conquering another—rather, they learn to cooperate within this queered body with the voice of their multiplicity. As the spirits in Ada say, “the worst part of embodiment is being unseen.” Though the spirits of Ada and Vincent may have come from another origin than Asughara and the god-swarm, they have all inhabited this body for the same amount of time; they all deserve to be understood within it. With this cooperation between Ada and her spirits—and these transformations of the body—the whole of their being is seen, reincarnated into something new without the death Ogbanje often bring. This novel stands as a powerful affirmation of queer, black resilience; of creating home within the body in a world that erects borders and forces diaspora as methods of domination; of learning to thrive in the in-between.
honey gaze 